Useful People
Elizabeth reached the hall with her bonnet in hand, and Mrs Gardiner already there, fastening the ribbon of her own.
“You are going out?” Mrs Gardiner asked.
“For air,” Elizabeth said.
“How fortunate. The children require air as well.”
Four small Gardiners stood by the door in various states of readiness, impatience, and argument.
“I did not mean to inconvenience you.”
“You have not,” Mrs Gardiner said. “I have inconvenienced myself quite deliberately.”
She handed the youngest his hat with practised efficiency and tied the strings before he could object.
They went out. The streets were cold and bright, the kind of December morning that could not quite decide whether to be cheerful about it.
The children moved ahead in a loose formation that suggested organisation without actually achieving it.
Mrs Gardiner walked beside Elizabeth and spoke of ordinary things: a shop she wished to look into, a letter she had received from a friend in Bath, the youngest’s inexplicable recent attachment to a particular spoon.
Elizabeth listened and responded and thought about Green Park. If Mrs Wickham was there, she would not come. Not with four children and Mrs Gardiner and whatever Mrs Gardiner had already understood from the print shop and the cold shop and the morning walk Elizabeth had taken alone yesterday.
If she was not there, it did not matter. Green Park came into view. At first Elizabeth saw only the usual morning traffic of a park in winter: a nursemaid, a gentleman with a cane, two boys attempting to slide on ground that was not quite frozen.
Then she saw Mrs Wickham. She was standing a little way from the walk beside the Queen’s Basin, one hand resting lightly on Anne’s shoulder while little George crouched near the grass in deep consultation with a stick.
Mrs Wickham saw Elizabeth, then Mrs Gardiner and the children. She did not join them at once, and Elizabeth did not move towards her. Anne tugged her mother’s hand and pointed. Mrs Wickham looked down at her daughter, then came towards them.
“Miss Bennet,” she said when she reached them. “I did not know you would be bringing your party this morning.”
“My aunt and cousins,” Elizabeth said. “Mrs Gardiner, may I present Mrs Wickham.”
“Mrs Wickham,” Mrs Gardiner said pleasantly. “Good morning.”
“Mrs Gardiner. You have your hands full.”
“Always,” Mrs Gardiner said, with the equanimity of long practice. She turned to redirect the youngest before he reached the puddle. “Do go on, Lizzy. I shall manage very well.”
“She is very kind,” Mrs Wickham said.
“She is very deliberate,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes,” Mrs Wickham said. “I noticed.”
They walked on together, a little apart from the children and from Mrs Gardiner, who was now engaged in preventing the youngest from investigating the puddle while simultaneously answering a question from the eldest about ducks.
“I did not know if you would come again,” Mrs Wickham said.
“I was not alone in coming.”
“No. Did you tell her?”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “She worked it out herself. Or some of it. She is from Lambton.”
“Then she knows more than most.”
“She knows what the neighbourhood knew,” Elizabeth said deliberately. “Which is the shape of things. Not the substance.”
Ahead of them Anne had found the youngest Gardiner child and was explaining something to him with great authority. He appeared to be listening, which suggested Anne had more success with small children than her brother did.
“The shape,” Mrs Wickham said, “is sometimes enough.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I have found that.”
“Mrs Wickham, I have been in London nearly three weeks. I have heard your husband’s name a great deal. I have not heard your brother’s.”
Mrs Wickham kept her eyes on the children. “No. You would not.”
“Where is he?”
“Safe. That is all I can tell you.”
“Safe?”
“For now.”
The words were almost lost beneath the shriek of one of the Gardiner children discovering, too late, that the puddle was deeper than it appeared.
“For now,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs Wickham’s face remained still. Only her breathing had changed.
“My brother has friends,” she said. “That must be enough. For me, and for you.”
“It is not enough.”
“No,” Mrs Wickham replied. “But it is what we have.”
Anne called to her mother then, and Mrs Wickham turned her head at once. The movement was small, but it ended the conversation as surely as if they had closed a door.
“I should not meet you here again,” she said.
“Because of your husband?”
“Because of everyone.”
Elizabeth felt the loss of the conversation before Mrs Wickham had taken a step away.
“Mrs Wickham.”
She stopped, though she did not turn fully back.
“If there is anything I may do…”
“There is a great deal you may wish to do,” Mrs Wickham said. “That is not the same thing.”
She turned back to Elizabeth. “Be careful with knowledge, Miss Bennet. It is not always protection. Sometimes it merely makes one more useful.”
Mrs Wickham inclined her head and walked back towards the children before Elizabeth could answer.
Anne took her mother’s hand at once. Little George followed after them, still carrying the stick, his small face set in serious concentration.
Elizabeth watched them go until Mrs Gardiner came to stand beside her.
“Lizzy,” she said, “when we return home, you will tell me why Mrs Wickham looked as though she had just warned you away from a precipice.”
“I do not know how much I can tell you.”
Mrs Gardiner’s expression did not alter, but she briefly tightened her hand around the youngest child’s.
“Then begin with what I must know,” she said. “Not what belongs to Mrs Wickham. Not what belongs to Mr Darcy. What I must know, if my house is to shelter you safely.”
That was exactly why Mrs Gardiner was dangerous. She made fear sound like household management.
They did not speak of it again in the park.
Mrs Gardiner collected the children with an efficiency that suggested she had decided the morning’s air had done everyone quite enough good.
The eldest protested. The youngest had mud on both stockings.
Thomas appeared from his discreet distance near the gate and followed them home with the same careful neutrality he had brought to Green Park.
Elizabeth walked alongside her aunt and said very little. Mrs Gardiner did not press her. That was worse, somehow, than questions. They had nearly reached Gracechurch Street when Elizabeth saw the man.
He stood outside a coffee-house with his hat pulled low, one shoulder turned from the wind. There was nothing remarkable in him. London was full of men waiting in doorways.
Then he looked up. Elizabeth knew him. Not by name.
She had seen him only once, and then by candlelight, in the confusion after the fire at Netherfield.
He had stood near the passage while Mr Darcy spoke to him in a low voice, one of those quiet men from the confusion after the fire, apparently belonging everywhere and nowhere.
He saw that she remembered. For the briefest moment, he bowed.
Mrs Gardiner did not turn her head. “Someone you know?”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
It was not quite false. She did not know him. But the man had been at Netherfield after the fire, and Mr Darcy had spoken to him as if he trusted him.
Elizabeth kept walking. Behind her, the man did not follow.
Gracechurch Street had never looked so ordinary. A cart rolled past. A maid hurried across the road with a covered basket. Somewhere nearby a door was being scrubbed with unnecessary vigour.
Elizabeth mounted the steps and told herself that ordinary things could still be trusted. Mrs Gardiner waited until they were inside, until bonnets were removed, children dispersed, and Thomas had withdrawn. Then she closed the parlour door.
“Lizzy,” she said, “we shall begin with the man outside the coffee-house.”
“I thought we were to begin with Mrs Wickham.”
“They may not be separate matters.”
Elizabeth sat because standing suddenly seemed too much like resisting.
“I do not know who he is.”
“But you recognised him.”
“Yes.”
“From Netherfield?”
“After the fire,” Elizabeth said. “He was one of the men Mr Darcy spoke to. I thought him a servant then, or perhaps one of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s people. I am not certain.”
“And now he is in London.”
“Yes.”
“And Mrs Wickham? What did she tell you that made you look as though earth had moved beneath your feet?”
“She said Mr Darcy was safe.”
“That is a curious thing to say of a young gentleman believed to be making a tour of Europe.”
“She said it was all she could tell me.”
“And did you believe her?”
Elizabeth thought of Mrs Wickham’s still face, her changed breathing, her careful refusal to speak beyond what was permitted.
“Yes,” she said. “I believed every word. That is what troubles me.”
Elizabeth told her aunt what she could. The things Mrs Wickham had chosen not to say were not Elizabeth’s to explain, nor was the way she had watched her children.
She left out, too, the gentleness with which she had said that her brother was tired.
She told Mrs Gardiner that Mr Darcy was safe, though only for now.
August mattered. And whatever Mrs Wickham feared, her husband was at the centre of it.
At Wickham’s name, Mrs Gardiner’s expression changed, though not with surprise. She had known him in Lambton.
“When Mrs Wickham spoke of August,” she said at last, “did she say what would happen then?”
“No.”
“But she expected you to understand that something would.”
“Yes.”
“And Mr Darcy?”
“She said he had friends. That it must be enough.”
“It is not enough,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs Gardiner rose.
“Aunt?”
“I am going to send for your uncle.”
“I did not mean to trouble him.”
“My dear Lizzy,” Mrs Gardiner said, with a steadiness that made the words more alarming rather than less, “when a gentleman’s safety, a married woman’s fear, and a man like Mr Wickham all stand in the same sentence, it is already trouble.”
She crossed to the bell. “And your uncle is very good with trouble that leaves paper behind.”